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May 7, 2013

[The depth of the inability to figure out what is
happening was reflected on Thursday in an unclassified Pentagon report to
Congress on North Korea’s military capabilities, which read much like it had
been written in the late 1980s. It also cast, by implication, significant doubt
that returning to negotiations would do much good: “In North Korea’s view,” it
concluded, “the destruction of regimes such as Ceausescu, Hussein and Qaddafi
was not an inevitable consequence of repressive government, but rather of a
failure to secure the necessary capabilities to defend their respective
autocratic regime’s survival.”]

WASHINGTON
— The black hole of North Korea intelligence
gathering is getting blacker.

When President Obama and South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-hye, meet for
the first time at the White House on Tuesday, intelligence officials and
outside experts say, they will be working, by necessity, from a deeply
incomplete understanding of their common adversary. At a time when the United
States has learned to conduct drone strikes with increasing accuracy in
Pakistan, and direct cyberweapons at specific nuclear centrifuges deep under
the Iranian desert, its understanding of North Korea’s leadership and weapons
systems has actually gotten worse.

The most recent intelligence failures included
what administration officials now acknowledge was the C.I.A.’s
initial judgment — now reversed — that the North’s young new leader, Kim Jong-un, was probably more interested
in economic reform than in following his father’s and grandfather’s “military
first” policy of bolstering the North’s missile and nuclear arsenals, and
threatening to use them unless the world came to its door.

At the same time, North Korea’s ability to hide
critical facts about its weapons capability has improved. Nearly three months
after the North’s third nuclear test dangerously escalated tensions on the
Korean Peninsula, the United States remains unable to answer the most crucial
question about the blast: whether the country figured out a way to enrich
uranium and dramatically speed its nuclear buildup. The North has managed to
contain the telltale gases that would have provided the answer, thwarting
American efforts to sniff out the evidence from Air Force sensors flown along
the North Korean coast.

Since then, new mobile missile systems have
appeared and then been whisked out of the view of spy satellites, leaving their
whereabouts, to say nothing of their ability to reach Guam or the West Coast of
the United States, uncertain. American officials said Monday that two missiles
they once believed the North could launch imminently had been moved from
launching sites, perhaps a sign that for now, at least, the North wants to
de-escalate.

In a sign of continuing confusion, the Defense
Intelligence Agency — the Pentagon’s intelligence arm — recently declared with
“moderate confidence” that the North can now shrink a nuclear warhead to fit
onto one of those missiles, only to find its assessment disputed, in public, by
both President Obama and the director of national intelligence.

“We lack uniform agreement on assessing many
things in North Korea,” the director, James R. Clapper Jr.,
recently told Congress in a blunt assessment of the disagreements within the
intelligence world. “Its actual nuclear capabilities are no exception.”

The depth of the inability to figure out what is
happening was reflected on Thursday in an unclassified Pentagon report to
Congress on North Korea’s military capabilities, which read much like it had
been written in the late 1980s. It also cast, by implication, significant doubt
that returning to negotiations would do much good: “In North Korea’s view,” it
concluded, “the destruction of regimes such as Ceausescu, Hussein and Qaddafi
was not an inevitable consequence of repressive government, but rather of a
failure to secure the necessary capabilities to defend their respective
autocratic regime’s survival.”

But the more immediate concern is that Kim
Jong-un could follow North Korea’s recent playbook and create another
provocation — akin to the sinking of a South Korean navy ship in 2010 or the
recent cyberattack on South Korean banks and news media companies. It took
weeks of investigation before South Korea could blame the North for those past
provocations.

More broadly, the lapses also raise a question
of why, 63 years after the outbreak of the Korean War — itself a move the
United States did not see coming — gathering information about the North has,
in the words of one frequent intelligence consumer, “made Syria and Iran look
like an open book.”

At the same time, Mr. Kim has stepped up efforts
to collect information about South Korea, as evidenced by the recent arrest in
Seoul of a North Korean homemaker who posed as a defector to the South.

“It’s an open question, who has penetrated whom
more effectively,” said Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s former director for weapons of
mass destruction.

North Korea has always been the hardest target,
but the difficulties of figuring out what is happening now range from
longstanding to brand new. The North has long been among the most brutal police
states in the world, “very good at scouting human spies,” says one American
intelligence official, “and finishing them off fast.” Thus, South Korean
intelligence services have a hard time inserting agents. It is all but
impossible for an outsider to travel unnoticed to the North, a land of many
checkpoints, few cars and a lot of neighborhood informers.

Moreover, the technique that has been so useful
in the case of Iran — recruiting scientists and others at international
conferences — has been virtually impossible in the case of the North, whose
officials rarely travel. When they do venture abroad, there are political
officers and other minders who monitor what they do and say. Even the biggest
potential bonanza — the arrival of cellphone networks — has been of limited use
to intelligence gatherers.

And the technique used so effectively on Iran
through 2010 — cyberespionage, and ultimately an attack on the centrifuges that run its
nuclear enrichment center at Natanz — does not appear to have been as useful in
North Korea. Computer use there is so limited — as is Internet access — that
America’s technological advantage has yielded fewer results, according to
officials familiar with the efforts. The North, meanwhile, has become more
skilled at launching cyberattacks — some through China — at South Korean banks
and television networks, including a devastating series of intrusions in March.

But the heart of the intelligence weakness
centers on Mr. Kim, who is thought to be in his late 20s. The Chinese, who
regularly invited his father, Kim Jong-il, to Beijing for consultations,
praise and occasional dressing-downs, contend they have had few meetings with
him. The only American to have dealt with him, quite famously, is Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star, whom
the F.B.I. was reported to have debriefed after he returned from a recent trip
to North Korea.

“There was a time that he was trying to open up
the nation with Western-style reforms,” Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori
Onodera, said of Mr. Kim in an interview last week during a visit to
Washington. “We were impressed that he admires Disneyland and loves American
basketball. But then he realized he could not control the country, and he moved
back to the military-first policy.” Mr. Onodera said he was worried that “his
father and his grandfather knew when to shift to ‘peace mode’ and shake hands;
it seems that Kim Jong-un doesn’t know when to put his fist down.”

In fact, in South Korea there is a theory that
behind his baby-faced look and easy smile is a Machiavellian who already has
top generals and party secretaries cowering at home, and is gambling that he
can force Washington to accept the North as a nuclear power.

South Korean officials were surprised to
conclude in recent months that despite Mr. Kim’s youth and inexperience, his
government and party are exerting control over the military, which many
regarded as too influential and too corrupt for that to occur. By some counts,
two-thirds of the North’s senior generals have been demoted, replaced or
shunted to less-powerful jobs; a few have been banished by the young leader.
All have had to sign loyalty letters.

Yet the view that Mr. Kim has become as powerful
as his father is not universal. “Who is in charge in North Korea? It’s hard to
say,” said a senior South Korean policy maker. “How strong is Kim Jong-un? We
don’t know exactly. Who is giving orders in Pyongyang? Apparently, it’s Kim
Jong-un, but we are not sure about the inner-circle decision-making process.”

It is a measure of the varying interpretations
inside the United States government that, testifying before the Senate Armed
Services Committee, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, the head of the Pacific
Command, called Mr. Kim “ impetuous” and “more unpredictable” than his father.
But speaking to the same committee, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the Defense
Intelligence Agency’s director, called Mr. Kim a leader “firmly in control” who
“possesses a charisma that his father did not,” and who understands
realpolitik, including that he could not survive full-scale war.

Mr. Kim’s government has also played a complex
game with American intelligence agencies. He knew the West would be intensely
interested in whether he tested another plutonium weapon or his first uranium
weapon, the product of a new uranium-enrichment capacity that the North has
only just unveiled.

But the test site was sealed to make it harder
to gather atmospheric evidence. “It’s inevitable that sooner or later they will
want us to know they can make a uranium weapon,” said Mr. Samore, the former
Obama adviser. “But no one knows quite why he is waiting.” One possible
explanation for the secrecy is that the technology is not working as
advertised: a combination of rookie errors and sabotage have long slowed Iran’s
efforts with the same technology.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and
Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting
from New York.